If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.

Our garden was debated territory between five local cats, and we'd heard that the best way to keep other cats out of the garden was to have one yourself. A moment's rational thought here will spot the slight flaw in this reasoning.

Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.

But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.

Any sensible ruler would have killed off Leonard, and Lord Vetinari was extremely sensible and often wondered why he had not done so. He'd decided that it was because, imprisoned in the priceless, inquiring amber of Leonard's massive mind, underneath that bright investigative genius was a kind of willful innocence that might in lesser men be called stupidity. It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millennia, had caused mankind to stick its fingers in the electric light socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened - and then be very surprised when it did.

The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn't actually exist at all.